Pior Labs is a collection of self-hosted productivity tools built around a shared technical foundation for authentication, networking, deployment, data, and interface design.
What began as a finance-tracking application built to solve a personal problem gradually became something larger. As I started using AI-assisted development to move faster and take on more ambitious projects, I also began uncovering the gaps between building an application and operating a complete software platform. Each new requirement pushed me into a different area of software engineering.
- Wanting privacy led me into self-hosting.
- Wanting consistency led me to create a shared design-system package and reusable application foundation.
- Wanting simplicity led me to build a private authentication service.
- Wanting reliability pushed me toward containerized deployments, automated workflows, and centralized routing.
- Wanting maintainability led me to organize the work into dedicated application, service, package, and platform repositories.
AI accelerated the development process, but it also made ownership more important. Generated code still had to be understood, validated, integrated, secured, deployed, and maintained. Filling in those gaps became the real purpose of Pior Labs.
The result is no longer just a collection of applications built for a résumé. It is an evolving platform that demonstrates how I approach full-stack development, infrastructure, authentication, automation, system design, and the practical challenges of running software myself.
The current platform foundation uses Docker Compose, a containerized Caddy edge, PostgreSQL, GitHub Actions, Tailscale, Cloudflare DNS, centralized OAuth/OIDC authentication, and a shared React design system.
Split-horizon DNS allows the same *.szarans.ca application URLs to resolve appropriately on the local network and over Tailscale, avoiding separate internal hostnames.
Finance is the first existing application to be fully migrated onto the shared platform model, including central SSO, platform networking, and PostgreSQL-backed persistence.
| Repository | Purpose | Status |
|---|---|---|
app-dashboard |
Central launchpad for hosted applications | Active |
service-auth |
Shared authentication and SSO | Active |
package-design-system |
Shared UI components and design tokens | Active |
platform |
Public architecture and platform documentation | Active |
app-finance-tracker |
Personal finance tracking | Active |
template-webapp |
Reusable starting point for new platform applications | Active |
app-cookbook |
Recipe collection and meal planning | Planned |
app-chatbot |
MCP-enabled platform assistant | Planned |
With the core platform migration complete, current work is focused on extending and hardening the foundation rather than replacing it:
- Use the standardized application pattern for new projects, beginning with the Cookbook.
- Continue reducing deployment-specific logic inside public application repositories.
- Improve observability, backup and restore procedures, and deployment verification.
- Expand reusable platform and design-system conventions as new applications expose common needs.
- Build an MCP-enabled assistant once the application ecosystem is established.
Pior Labs is under active development. The core self-hosted platform foundation is operational; individual applications and platform capabilities will continue to evolve.
This is a personal portfolio organization. External pull requests are not currently accepted.